Most organizations of all sizes currently utilize cloud services in some way. However, of the multiple cloud services available to them, cloud object storage represents the one they primarily use. In most cases, they use it to store their archival and backup data.
Storing this data in the cloud sets the stage for them to perform disaster recoveries and/or satisfy regulatory requirements. Others use cloud object storage’s data immutability feature to secure their data from the growing threat of ransomware. Still others view cloud object storage’s durability, resilience, and scale as their best option for long-term data retention.
These reasons help explain why 84% of organizations plan to increase their use of cloud object storage. They need a simple, secure, cost-effective way to store their growing amounts of archival and backup data. They also want to offload the complexities and overhead of managing the underlying storage infrastructure. Cloud object storage aligns well with this combination of needs and wants.
However, deciding to store data in the cloud creates a potential challenge for organizations. Having decided to use cloud object storage, they may choose from more than 50 available providers. Further, more cloud providers offer multiple tiers of cloud object storage with each tier possessing differing availability, price, and performance characteristics. All these options influence each organization’s choice of a cloud provider to host its archival and backup data.
‘Easy’ and ‘Safe’ Come at a Premium
Organizations often first consider cloud object storage from the three largest general-purpose cloud providers. Amazon Simple Storage Services (S3), Google Cloud Storage, and Microsoft Blob each provide the core technical features that organizations seek. Equally important, these general-purpose cloud providers have a global presence and a high level of awareness within organizations. These factors contribute to any of these provider’s cloud storage offerings being an easy, safe choice for organizations to make.
However, these three options come at an elevated cost. Unless organizations choose otherwise, these general-purpose cloud providers assign their standard cloud object storage tier by default. The costs for this tier range from $15-23 TB per month or $180-276/TB per year, depending on the provider.
Organizations that store up to a few dozen terabytes of data on their default object storage tier may find these costs acceptable. Though organizations pay a premium, they obtain the availability, data security, performance, reliability, and peace of mind they seek. Further, many storage appliances and archival, backup, and data management software providers support these cloud object storage offerings.
Counting Cloud Storage’s Cost
Paying $180 per year for 1TB of cloud storage or even up to $2,760 per year for 10TB may not sound like a lot. However, any organization that takes the time to count cloud object storage’s cost quickly sees how these costs add up.
Further, the cloud storage capacity costs only represent a portion of what organizations may pay. Once organizations store data on cloud object storage, they need to consider how frequently they will access and move it. If organizations end up performing these tasks frequently, they may incur other fees that include:
- Data retrieval. Once organizations store data in the cloud, they may need to access and manage it in multiple ways through a web interface. These activities may include copying it, getting a listing of it, or retrieving it, among other possible tasks. Executing any of these commands incurs a fee above and beyond the organization’s monthly storage costs. The data retrieval fees charged by providers are nominal (no more than 5 cents per 1,000 requests.) However, they can add up for organizations that expect to frequently take actions on their data.
- Data transfer or egress outside the provider’s cloud. No cloud provider currently charges organizations to transfer data into their respective storage clouds over the Internet. However, organizations that transfer data out of the provider’s cloud may incur egress fees depending on the data transfer amount. While some providers allow organizations to transfer some data out (up to 100GB) monthly, egress fees start after that. These network usage fees range from .02 to .16 cents/GB.
- Data transfer or egress to another data center within the provider’s cloud. Organizations must also ensure they store their data in the right location within the provider’s cloud. Each provider has cloud data center locations all over the globe. If an organization stores its data in the wrong location and needs to move it, it gets charged a fee.
These three represent only a snapshot of the additional cloud object storage fees that organization may incur. If they plan to encrypt it, monitor it, or replicate it, these activities may also incur further cloud object storage fees.
These fees have less of an impact on organizations that only store TBs or even tens of TBs in the cloud. However, organizations that expect to store more than tens of TBs in the cloud should explore new cloud object storage options. These options may help lower storage costs, simplify management, and even eliminate unexpected data retrieval and transfer fees.
Pros and Cons of Cloud Object Storage Tiering
Organizations that primarily store archival and backup data with the largest cloud providers may only infrequently incur data retrieval fees. They will more likely feel their wallet impacted by the costs associated with storing more archival and backup data. The other cloud object storage tiers available from these providers may help control and even lower recurring monthly storage costs.
Enabling cloud object storage tiering represents both an easy and a complicated decision. These providers make it relatively easy to move data to other cloud object storage tiers.
To do so, a cloud administrator for the organization logs into the organization’s cloud account. Once logged in, the individual can choose one of two options.
- The administrator can simply move the storage to another tier.
- Alternatively, they may use the provider’s lifecycle management feature. Using this feature, it places data on different storage tiers as the data ages. It can even delete data once it reaches a certain age.
Moving data to other cloud storage tiers will likely result in organizations lowering their recurring monthly storage costs. However, this is not a guarantee. Organizations can optionally choose to move data to more expensive storage tiers.
Unfortunately, storage tiering does nothing to address the other costs associated with using each provider’s cloud object storage offering. Storage tiering may even introduce new usage fees since the lifecycle management has a cost associated with it.
Further, storing data on different cloud object storage tiers complicates storage management. Using these other tiers to host data impacts the data’s availability and performance. These tiers use storage media that is more prone to be offline and have slower access times even when online.
This becomes problematic from a management perspective. Cloud storage administrators cannot always anticipate when and how quickly specific applications need access to data stored in the cloud. This uncertainty makes administrators reluctant to use cloud tiering at scale or using it all. Tiering may result in slow access times, data being unavailable, and it makes cloud storage management more complicated.
The Rise of Purpose-built Object Storage Clouds for Archival and Backup Data
New purpose-built object storage clouds have emerged that address these cloud object storage issues of cost, complexity, and performance. These new clouds distinguish themselves from the cloud object storage offerings available from general-purpose cloud providers in an important way. They specifically target organizations that want to store archival and backup data in the cloud.
By primarily focusing on hosting data from these two applications, they provide the following three benefits for organizations:
- Simplified management. These providers only offer one cloud object storage tier on which to store data. This eliminates the need to manage lifecycle policies or worrying about the storage tier on which data gets placed.
- Lower monthly storage costs. They compete in cloud storage capacity costs by typically charging one-half to one-fifth of what general-purpose cloud providers charge for a comparable storage tier.
- No network usage or egress fees. These purpose-built providers eliminate the unpredictable costs that general-purpose cloud providers charge to access or retrieve data. They simply do not charge these fees. This gives organizations the flexibility to manage and retrieve data at their discretion.
These three benefits make it appealing for organizations to store their archival and backup data with purpose-built cloud storage providers. However, organizations should not view these providers as a panacea for all their cloud storage challenges.
The cloud storage tier these purpose-built cloud storage providers use to store data typically has lower availability characteristics. They often do not offer availability zones that simultaneously store data in two or more geographic locations. Instead, they only store an organization’s data in one data center. If that specific data center goes offline for some reason, organizations must wait until it comes back online.
Further, many of these purpose-build providers currently own or lease fewer cloud data center locations than general-purpose cloud providers. The geographic location of their data centers may preclude organizations from using them due to compliance or disaster recovery concerns.
The Dynamics of Cloud Object Storage Have Permanently Changed
The dynamics of cloud object storage have permanently changed with organizations having more cloud object storage choices than ever. They have more providers from which to choose. Further, they may select from multiple cloud object storage offerings available at various price points with differing availability and performance characteristics.
However, all these choices create challenges for organizations seeking to achieve broader corporate objectives without breaking the storage budget.
General-purpose cloud providers offer the most robust cloud object storage choices. However, they change a premium, their cloud storage feature set may be overkill for organizations, and it can become complex to manage. Further, if organizations want to switch, these providers make it difficult and charge an exit fee to leave them.
Purpose-built cloud storage providers offer a practical alternative for organizations that need to store their archival and backup data off-site. These cloud providers charge less per GB, make their cloud storage easier to manage, and have almost no variable costs. However, they lack many of the robust availability and management features that some organizations may need.
Organizations that only possess a few TBs of data and expect limited growth will still find choosing a general-purpose cloud provider the easy choice.
However, those organizations with rapidly growing cloud data stores, it behooves them to explore existing cloud object storage options. They can potentially reduce their monthly cloud storage costs by up to half while also eliminating their management complexity and data transfer and retrieval fees.
